UNOFFICIAL OHS DATABASE
OHS WEB RESEARCH HELP
You may be wondering how I find all of this information. I have been a heavy web user for several years now and below I share some of my "trade secrets" with you.
There are two major issues when searching for information on the web, depending on your planned use of that information.
In Australia, once a page is published on the web the site owner immediately has copyright over any original material on it. This includes any images on a site. If you plan to use any material, you will either need to credit the author or ask for her/his permission to use it, depending on the context of its use. Some site owners permit use of their work for non-commercial purposes or in limited educational settings.
Do not confuse the use of website material to linking to that material. It is not a breach of copyright to link to pages on a site so any internal policies forbidding deep linking to their material are not legally enforceable. However, you are not able to copy and paste material on those pages into your own without the site owner's consent or try to present them as your own material.
The second issue is reliability. The web's unrestricted nature is both a blessing and a curse. While this freedom means that authors' inspiration, observations and knowledge are unfettered by political agendas, it also means that some of the information on sites is incorrect, biased and/or misleading. More on this issue can be found below.
Sources of information
If you haven't discovered Google yet, I'd suggest you try it. You can search for Australia-specific articles if need be. It also has a translation facility for information written in different languages.
Directories and the hidden web: Yahoo and Dmoz are directories (as opposed to search engines) with information organised into categories, and can be useful.
Be aware that there is such a thing as "the invisible web" which may contain information not found via conventional searches.
Legal sources: Lawlink is a useful resource for NSW legal information. Especially note its comprehensive Legal Resources area.
The Australasian Legal Institute website (Austlii) provides access to most Australian legislation and regulations, plus also decisions made in the courts and tribunals. The Worldlii site provides the international equivalent of Austlii. The Parliamentary Counsel website provides all NSW legislation and regulations and is arguably more reliable, despite its navigational shortcomings. You can access the NSW Hansard via the NSW Parliament website.
General: Wikipedia is an open source online encyclopaedia. The users themselves update the material so there is no single "authority" on it. Obviously, the information in it cannot always be relied upon, but it contains some interesting and obscure knowledge.
Generally speaking, websites whose domain names end with .gov.au can be relied upon for Australian information (or .gov for USA and .gov.uk for Britain), although you need to be aware that different states will be governed under different legislation.
Site-specific searches: You can conduct site-specific searches using Google, which I find is more effective than many websites' own internal search functions.
For example, if you would like to search for information about pregnancy in the workplace on WorkCover NSW's site, go to Google and type in: pregnancy site:workcover.nsw.gov.au. This will return all pages and publications on the WorkCover NSW site with the word "pregnancy" in them. Or if you wish to search the NOHSC site for that material, type in pregnancy site:nohsc.gov.au. Be aware that Google usually updates its indexes every few days so it may miss newly created pages.
Domain-specific searches: You can also easily search all Australian government websites - federal, state and local government - by typing pregnancy site:gov.au. Since this search isn't targeted at only OHS-related sites, making this search will return all sorts of personnel policies of government institutions, and anti-discrimination material. So, to narrow it down, you would probably need search on pregnancy workplace site:gov.au or perhaps pregnancy workplace safety site:gov.au
Australian state government sites have the following domain extensions:
NSW - nsw.gov.au
Victoria - vic.gov.au
Queensland - qld.gov.au
South Australia - sa.gov.au
Western Australia - wa.gov.au
Tasmania - tas.gov.au
ACT - act.gov.au
Northern Territory - nt.gov.au
Bear in mind that searching on these domains will also bring up local government sites.
Other useful extensions to make domain-specific searches with are:
Important points to note: Be aware that not all Australian sites have an au extension. This is because .au domains are more expensive to purchase than generic extensions, eg .com or .net. Some site owners (like me) take price into consideration when deciding on a domain name.
Also note that, due to privatisation, some sites which you would expect to be .gov.au or .edu.au will have a .com.au extension.
For international searches, all country domain extensions are listed on Webopedia.
Google's Advanced Search function is especially useful for narrowing your searches, including domain, positioning of keywords and languages used.
If you encounter a site with information you need to access, but is in another
language, there are a number of translation services on the web. They are not
precise but can be of use at times. Examples: Google
language tools, Altavista
Babelfish or Dictionary.com's
translations.
The Google cache
Another incredibly useful thing about Google is its cache. Google saves pages
that it indexes, so even if the site owner has removed the page (delivering
a 404 error page) or if the site is down, you can still access the page kept
in Google's cache. This sometimes even probes "members only" areas
of sites, which can be useful at times. Yahoo
also caches web pages.
Saving pages
If the information you find is indispensable and you're worried that the page will disappear (which happens a lot, believe me) you can save the file to your computer hard drive. Just choose File-Save As. You will have various options.
Saving a page as a "Web Archive" or .mht file (see below screenshot) is great if you only use Internet Explorer. However, I have tried emailing .mht files and they have been broken up into useless units.
For this reason, "Web page HTML only" is often the best format to save pages in if there are no essential images on the page, and it saves hard drive space.
Saving as "Web Page Complete" creates a bit of a mess in your file system and I don't recommend it unless you really know what you're doing.
Saving the page as a "Text File" removes all formatting and may make the information harder to read, although it uses very little hard drive space.
Google News
Another excellent research tool is Google
News, which is updated every 15 minutes, and can help you find out recent
events in OHS and industrial issues. This does not support country-specific
searches like the web service, so if you were searching for pregnancy in the
workplace issues in NSW you may type in: pregnancy workplace NSW or
perhaps pregnancy workplace sydney.
Finding images (pictures)
If you are seeking pictures of OHS-related topics, Google again comes to the rescue. This time it's Google images. Posters and signage information can be found under the Posters and signs page on this site.
If you are hopeless with computers and would like to improve your knowledge, I made a website for web newcomers (also non-commercial) called the New Computer Users' Site. It has not been updated for a couple of years but much of the information is still relevant.